Meditations in Wonderland by Anna Patrick

Indiebound/Amazon/Barnes & Noble/Kobo/

Published by River Grove Books

Review by Dani Hoots
The reviewer received a complimentary review copy, in exchange for an honest review of the book.

Meditations in Wonderland by Anna Patrick follows Elizabeth who struggles looking herself in the mirror, not wanting to see the darkness in her soul. She takes ‘recreations drugs’ to deal with the anxiety, a blue pill and orange pill depending on how bad it is. Her boyfriend since high school doesn’t know this and she tries to just see the light in his eyes as her reflection. They get in a fight about her anxiety and when she goes to meditate and falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. There, she must find Alice and face the consequences of hiding from one’s self.

This is an interesting take on finding one’s self. As she goes through Wonderland, she finds out different things about herself. There were still some things that were unanswered, like why her boyfriend has a raven tattoo. It sounded like she did something to him or did something that caused him pain, but I’m not sure as to what that was. It was also unclear why she couldn’t look at herself in the mirror in the first place, and how she came upon the pills with her friend that her boyfriend knows nothing about.

The scenery of Wonderland was quite entertaining, playing off the original story but Patrick added her own little twists to it. I loved the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter. The Mad Hatter was quite interesting as a character and was my favorite out of all of them (although, he always is). Patrick also did a good job with the characters of the original story and twisting them into her own creation. I wished we got to see even more characters, but those that were there were still quite interesting.

For the ending, I wished it it ended a few pages early. I don’t want to give it away, but I just felt it could have ended a little bit earlier to get more of a dramatic effect. With the stuff that was added, I didn’t really have much interest in and felt like it didn’t really draw to a close with it.

All in all, I give this novel a 4/5, as it captured my attention, as any Wonderland book should, and I was left wanting to fall down the rabbit hole myself. I wished I knew a little more about the main characters, but they were still very interesting.